The present disclosure relates to air traffic management, in particular, to managing trajectories for a mixed fleet of Performance Based Navigation (PBN) capable aircraft and non-PBN aircraft based on probabilistic properties of trajectory predictions.
In conventional operations, an aircraft's flight may generally follow a path defined by radio navigation beacons. Thus, such flight paths are often not the most direct route to a target since only limited number of radio navigation beacons can be listed and shared by all flights in the airspace. RNAV provide a means for an aircraft to know its location at any given moment of time so it can be navigated from its origin to its destination along a path defined by navigation fixes that are not necessarily coincident with radio navigation beacons, resulting in more consistent and more direct routes. RNP, a technology enabled by satellite based navigation, allows an aircraft to fly a RNAV path, including curved segments, with high precision. This technology allows for the flight path to be precisely planned and further optimized to enhance safety, be more direct and improve efficiency. Coupled with the Vertical Navigation (VNAV) capability provided by the Flight Management System (FMS) on board the aircraft, RNP/RNAV procedures, or PBN procedures, are viewed as the future of flight navigation.
However, one problem with the implementation of the PBN is that there may be multiple flights in an airspace to compete for the same resource(s). Without coordination in advance, air traffic controllers may have to vector aircraft by instructing one or more of specific tactical speed, altitude, and heading commands to the aircraft so that a safe separation between aircraft can be maintained all the times. In a terminal area, this may mean flight path stretches and level flight segments, whose exact occurrence and parameters cannot be predicted in advance. In some instances, the skill of an art by the air traffic controller may be heavily depended on given the uncertainties in arrival time and trajectory. Also, RNP/RNAV arrival and approach procedures, although they may have already been developed for a destination terminal area, are often not cleared for flights that capable of flying these procedures and/or may be vectored off the procedure flight path to address spacing between aircraft. As such, there may be a lower than desired utilization of the airborne capabilities and procedures that have already been deployed and future systems.
Therefore, there exists a desire to provide a system and processes that can generate flight path trajectories based on actual conditions for particular flights using probabilities that is compatible with mixed fleet aircraft having different navigational capabilities.